WP Theater records

The WP Theater records came to the Sophia Smith Collection in eight donations from 1989-2014. Parts of the papers arrived foldered and organized, as they had been in the WP Theater offices, but many documents arrived unfoldered and unordered. In 2018, Amanda Ferrara did some preliminary processing. In organizing the materials, in many cases folder titles were taken from the group's original organization. Other folder titles were created by the Ferrara. Unfoldered materials were roughly sorted and and described so they could be made available for research use.

In January-February 2019, processing was carried out by Madison White, Scott Biddle, and Ellice Amanna. When we came to the collection, it had already been partially processed, so we used the existing structure to determine how we would order the collection. For unprocessed boxes, we separated materials into 3 series: Plays, Administrative Files, and Julia Miles papers. We removed obvious duplicates and sensitive materials. Materials related to education were carefully screened to remove any FERPA protected materials. For materials that we were unsure whether to include in series 1 or 2 (mainly rehearsed readings and festivals) we let the previous work done take the lead. We moved AV and digital materials to their own boxes, but decided to describe them as part of the three series.

Once series had been roughly sorted and duplicates separated, we then started ordering individual series. All series were ordered alphabetically. We refoldered and boxed as needed, mainly when slumping was an issue. Since most folders already had accurate labeling, we decided to keep existing file names and to only rarely separate materials found in one folder. AV materials and posters were ordered in the same way as the collection.

Once the collection had its new arrangement we started on the description, correcting mistakes as we went. Series 1, Plays, were described at the play level, with brief descriptions of the materials in each play’s files. Series 2 and 3 were described at the file level. AV and oversize posters and art were described within each series, including extent, format, and content information.

The contents of three floppy disks were copied to networked storage for preservation and access; the original directory and file structure was retained and file lists were created. Three additional floppy disks containing draft scripts for "Night Sky" were unable to be copied.